Everyday life in the sandhills of Nebraska: travel, writing, Husker football, Husker volleyball, and farming.
Living in the middle of nowhere and loving every minute of it.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

A Writer's Life

A writer's life is often a lonely life. You have to enjoy the solitude - the quiet noises of the house; enjoy the ideas pressing against one another inside your creative psyche, each one inching forward, trying to outwit the other character voices that are developing or the topics that randomly pop up inside your mind. You have to appreciate the "aha" moment, because usually, you're the only person who gets it.

Sometimes you have to appreciate that you're the only person who realizes that you have talent, and your SO - although proud of what you have accomplished in the past - doesn't understand that sometimes writing is a game, but it's a game you're good at. And a game that you've proven you can play. And most importantly, a game that you succeed at. It gets lonely though when you feel like there's this pressure to be able to show something tangible that you've accomplished that day, when you might have plotted or outlined a storyline or an article you're developing and what you have is a mass of organized chaos in some form of a graphic organizer on paper. It makes sense to you, but to others, it appears you haven't done anything that day. Except doodle.

Writing also takes time. And time is built into the loneliness of the writer's life. You write 24 hours a day. Your mind is constantly on overdrive, looking for a slant, molding some piece of jagged energy into a coherent work. You make up in the middle of the night when a phrase, idea, or plotline pops into your head and you frantically scribble details in the notebook on your nightstand or you rush to the computer, fingers skipping across the keyboard, trying to capture that essence that roused you from sleep.

You're caught on the fringe, eavesdropping on conversations, yet you don't directly participate. You glimpse into someone else's world and then you reinvent it.

It's lonely because your mind seems to never stop, never slows for a meandering thought. Instead, it pushes your harder, instigating a headache from the rush of words, causing you to feel like you'll never have the opportunity to tell all the stories you need to tell.